Viral video of woman beaten up by men: No communal angle to the 2-yr-old incident

A purported video of a Dalit woman being beaten up for bathing in a water body is making the rounds on social media. The footage shows a group of young men thrashing the woman with sticks and rods on the banks of a pond or canal.

Syrian reporter Bilal Abdul Karim tweeted this video and wrote, “This is Modi’s India, wherein Hindu extremists can beat a poor Dalit woman, record it and laugh for all to see!” (Archived link)

A Twitter handle named Indian Muslim posted the video and wrote that a Dalit woman was being brutally thrashed by members of a Hindutva extremist organization. It also added that India was the only country in the world in which the extremist Hindu Right-Wing continued to perpetuate all manner of gross human rights violations, especially against Muslims and Dalits. (Archived link)

A user named Kavita Rani tweeted the clip with the same claim and wrote that the incident was from the BJP-ruled state of Madhya Pradesh. (Archived link)

This is from #BJP ruled state #MadhyaPradesh. CM #ShivrajSinghChouhan Look at this.
A dalit girl is beaten mercilessly for bathing in the river. This is new India of Modi. pic.twitter.com/NqKRnKVWsf

— Kavita Rani (@KavitaBRS) January 31, 2023

Another user tweeted the video, claiming that people associated with the RSS and BJP brutally assaulted a Dalit woman in Uttar Pradesh after she had taken a bath in a river. (Archived link)

Fact Check

Alt News performed a reverse image search using frames taken from the viral video. This led us to a two-year-old Dainik Bhaskar news report covering the incident. According to this article, the incident occurred in the Pipalwa village in Madhya Pradesh’s Dhar district. On June 22, 2021, two girls were thrashed by their family members for talking to their maternal uncle’s son on mobile phone. An FIR was registered in this matter and seven people were arrested after the video went viral. As per the outlet, there was no caste angle to the incident.

We found another report related to this video on the NDTV website, which states that the victims belonged to a tribal community. According to reports, the violence was not communally motivated.

 

To sum it up, the viral video is neither recent, nor from Uttar Pradesh. The clip shows a two-year-old incident from Madhya Pradesh. It is falsely being shared on Twitter with a communal angle. Both the victim and the accused are members of the same family. The claims about BJP and RSS members beating up a Dalit woman are baseless.